The IT industry is fast moving, and is full of people in their twenties and thirties. So perhaps it is not surprising that it does not learn well from past mistakes. Those rather longer in the tooth can permit themselves a wry smile as the industry shows a new fad for “executive dashboards”, “cockpits”, “balanced scorecard applications” and the like. The idea is fine: rather than having to wade through endless reports, senior executives of a company will be presented with a pretty display, like the cockpit of an airplane, showing the critical operational numbers of how their business is performing: sales, gross margins, production quality and such. The more entertaining demos of such products show a mythical executive “drilling in” on a problem area, and immediately identifying an operational problem from the pretty charts that come up, which is then fixed via a swift email to the offending business unit.

Like many fairy tales, this sounds nice, but the reality is somewhat different. I recently met the chairman of a major brewery, and he told me a very different story. He explained that his dashboard has numerous missing business areas and little notes attached to numbers with endless caveats. Why should this be? The problem is not the dashboard applications in themselves; the problem is with actually getting at the underlying data that feeds the dashboards. Those with long memories will recall Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) which were sold to senior executives in the late 1980s on exactly the same promise. How many of those are still around? Those systems failed because it took the same army of analysts who currently produce the nice PowerPoint slides that executives review, to be able to feed the EIS systems that would prettily display the same numbers on the EIS screens. Most people would probably rather scan through a set of well-presented slides than click around on a screen anyway, so no value was added. All the same analysts were employed, plus a few more who had to feed the EIS system, so the systems were mostly quietly retired when the sponsoring executive moved on.

The problem is a fundamental one: the information that provides things like gross margin by product, channel and customer is buried away in a multiplicity of separate operational systems: multiple instances of ERP, plus CRM systems, supply chain systems and the many, many other systems that large companies use. It is the multiple sets of business definitions embedded in these multiple systems that cause the problem.